Can Flock Safety be trusted?

Our Take

Matt Schlegel's interview with Palo Alto Council Member Pat Burt is worth watching precisely because it isn't coming from the usual suspects. This isn't an activist or a civil liberties lawyer raising red flags about Flock Safety — it's an elected official who has presumably sat through the vendor presentations, read the contracts, and still came away asking whether the company can be trusted. When the people responsible for approving these systems start voicing doubts, that's a signal the sales pitch isn't matching the reality on the ground.

That gap matters because ALPR networks like Flock's aren't just "helping solve crimes" in the abstract — they're building a permanent, searchable record of where everyone drives, shared across jurisdictions and sometimes beyond local control. Local officials are often told the data stays local, access is tightly audited, and the system is narrowly scoped. Burt's skepticism, as described in this video, points to the recurring problem we track here: policy promises on paper don't always hold up once the cameras go in and the data starts flowing to other agencies, contractors, or federal partners.

We credit Schlegel for giving a local decision-maker space to speak plainly instead of reciting a vendor's talking points, and we'd encourage every city councilmember weighing a Flock contract to ask the same blunt question out loud. If you want to see whether these cameras have already landed in your town, check our map, and if you want to push back before or after they do, our take-action page has concrete steps.